One additional thought is that if the Mustang line had followed that first concept, they could have saved a lot of money on tooling since it was so very ugly thyat very few of them would sell. Fortunately wiser folks prevailed.

I agree about hose open cars being an intensly poor idea. Completely aside from weather and safety issues is the security issue. In Detroit a car must have doors that lock, because of the car-jackers. So an open car would have a very short lifetime around here.

Great post, thanks. The worst idea has to be the "smart" that has done away with ballast like doors, roof and rear windows. One side impact accident and you're dead, 10 minutes in the sun and you're sunburned or a bit of rain and you're drenched, and anything that isn't nailed down get pinched. Some of the others quite nice and inspiring. Yep give me a GT90

It is not reasonable to even think that any of the concept cars prior to the mid sixties could have included any CAD operations in their creation. And just because a single copy can be produced does not mean that even a second copy would be any easier than the first.

Solid modeling and CAD and other simulation software certainly make great designs easier, but they are by no means the only way great designs happen. Engineering brilliance and creativity are the more critical parts of the mix.

One thing that did impress me was: The GT90 concept was declared by Ford to be the "world's mightiest sports car." While I don't know what the top speed of the mid-sixties "Griffith" was, it also had a big Ford engine that was "not quite stock", and probably not even close to stock. The GT90 looks a lot like the Griffith before all of those angles were smoothed out. I don't know it it would have been called a production model, but there were two of them in the college parking lot where I attended in 1966.

Good point about fabrication, bobjengr. That's particulaly the case for high volume fabrication. That's why most concept cars never reach production. The ones that do usually see some dramatic (and boring) changes.

Very very informative slide show Charles. I love to see engineering and design talent pushed to extreme as these cars indicate they have been. I am assuming all of the design was CAD and solid modeling. In other words, the products can be built. I know that sometimes what really looks good is very difficult to fabricate. I would love to see most of these newer product on the road.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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